Support and General Use > Hardware
Archos Jukebox Recorder: can it use an IDE-CF adapter?
mbraner:
The hard drive in a friend's Archos Jukebox Recorder (v1 - 6GB) died, so I thought it would be a good time to try replacing it with a solid-state storage device. I got an IDE-CF adapter, this model:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812200154
(which I actually got here - seems to be the same model, although they got the picture wrong:
http://www.amazon.com/Compact-Flash-Adapter-Ide-44PIN/dp/B0013FX4KY )
and plugged a 2G compact flash card into it
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-2-GB-CompactFlash-Card/dp/B000GC57E6
This combo works as an external drive if I connect it to a PC via a USB-IDE adapter. But when I put it into the Archos Jukebox, it does not recognize the "drive". It hangs in the booting (at the 4-dots stage), or (if I plug it into the PC with a USB cable) shows the USB image but goes no further (on either the Archos or the PC). Sometimes, after a little while, I get an error message on the Archos: HD register error. I tried with the IDE adapter jumpered as master and as slave, the only difference was that the LED on it lit as slave but not as master, and the register error seemed a bit different:
-------- as master --------
HD register error
SC1 ( 85) 85
SN1 (170) 1
SC2 (170) 170
SN2 ( 85) 85
---------------------------
-------- as slave --------
HD register error
SC1 ( 85) 174
SN1 (170) 174
SC2 (170) 255
SN2 ( 85) 255
---------------------------
(It works via the USB adapter if jumpered as master, not as slave.)
The CF card came formatted as FAT (not FAT32 - surprising for a 2G card? 32K clusters), after it didn't work in the Archos I reformatted it as FAT32 but that did not help.
I also wondered if I have plugged it into the IDE connector in the correct orientation, as there is no "key" on the Archos, nor any mark of which is "pin 1". From the HDD docs it seems that pin 1 is towards the digital-I/O jack?
I've found only one short reference in the archives here to doing this sort of conversion of the Jukebox to solid-state storage, and that seemed to say it worked. Perhaps there was more discussion of such - pointers welcome!
I also have an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20G USB2 model which I was planning to do the same conversion to (with a larger CF card) - is it any different in its compatibility with such an adapter?
Thanks for any leads.
mbraner:
Tried two different CF cards, an another Jukebox (20MB USB2 model), nothing works. The two CF cards in the second JB gave different behaviors: one got stuck on 4 dots in the booting, the other proceeded after some seconds to an error message: "ATA error: -80, press "on" to debug". These IDE/CF adaptors are passive rewiring jobs, the ATA emulation is really inside the CF card, perhaps that's why the different behavior - but that also perhaps means that other brand adaptors won't work any better? Would other brand CD cards help? Has this approach worked for anybody?
mbraner:
Success - sort of!
Tried one more CF card, a rather old Viking 128MB. It works! At first it showed
a strange "empty" disk display (but no error message) in the Archos firmware, and connecting the USB interface to a PC did not show up as a drive on the PC. After putting Rockbox on the CF card (via a USB card reader, not the Archos JBR), the same card in the JBR flashed "Rockbox" briefly (i.e., it must have read the Rockbox software off the CF card!) but then the display said: "no partition found, plug in USB and fix it". But USB connection still did not work. Put back
the CF card back in card reader, and reformatted as FAT32 (rather than FAT=FAT16). It now fully works in the JBR! Alas with 128MB that not very useful. But it seems that some CF cards are more compatible than others.
Some googling found that CF cards are supposed to operate in 3 different modes:
1) PC Card I/O Mode,
2) PC Card Memory Mode (CF Mode), and
3) True IDE Mode (Fixed Mode).
But perhaps some cards do not provide all those modes - their main use these days is for high-end digital cameras, perhaps those are less stringent.
So the question is, which current larger-capacity CF cards (2GB or more) provide true IDE compatibility and would work in the Archos JBR?
One of the CF cards that did NOT work for me was a 2G Kingston:
http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-2-GB-CompactFlash-Card/dp/B000GC57E6
Neither did this 8G Transcend card work for me:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820208340
Would this 16G RiData one work?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820183190
(the page says "Conforms to the Compact Flash Association standard, Compatible with PC card standards and PC card ATA", and another page about the same card more explicitly says: "True IDE Mode compatible"
- http://www.meritline.com/ridata-16g-233x-cf-card.html )
Any other (perhaps less expensive, 2G-8G) CF cards out there that promise full IDE compatibility?
Davide-NYC:
I have no idea if this will work on an archos but you could check out this patch by Petur.
http://www.rockbox.org/tracker/task/8644
Good luck!
mbraner:
More partial success:
I got hold of the 4GB version of the RiData Lightning Series card, which supposedly is "True IDE Mode compatible". It behaves as follows:
If Rockbox is not on the card, the Jukebox boots its original firmware and lists the two MP3 files I put on the card. It played one of them OK, hung on "starting" the other one but that may be a different problem.
If Rockbox is on the card, the booting gets to the point where "Rockbox" flashes very briefly on the screen, and then it says only this on the screen:
ATA error: -80
Press ON to debug
So it seems that the hardware works, is the remaining issue a software (Rockbox) rather than a hardware problem? I don't understand the posting above about a patch to Rockbox to make it work with a flash card - on a different hardware platform. I don't know how to use such a patch... Any chance for such a patch applied to a version of Rockbox compiled for the Archos Jukebox Recorder V1? What's the official way to request that such a fix be put into a future Rockbox build?
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